Warning Labels of Love
Finding Our Way to God’s Place of Blessing
Deuteronomy 28
I roll my eyes at pharmaceutical commercials. The rejuvenated grandpa jumps around like an acrobat while building a three-story fort with his grandchildren. The re-energized mother takes granola cookies out of the oven before starting her morning run alongside the family’s golden retriever, her kids tucked in a jogger stroller. As the vignettes unfold and I watch from the couch in pajama pants, the narrator sneaks into the background. Speaking at three times normal speed, he lists the risks of the advertised drug. “Side effects may include,” he begins in soothing monotone, and the alarming conditions race by as the peppy soundtrack plays on, bursting my momentary hope of an easy fix.
We don’t want to hear about skin rashes, vomiting, tremors, tumors, suicidal thoughts, strokes, or the possibility of death. We just want our headaches cured, our anxiety lessened, or our cholesterol reduced. But the laws protecting our welfare require drug companies to reveal the dangers, even if they try to slide it in behind the happily-ever-after sales pitch. The warnings are important and the potential risks real.
God’s Warning Labels
“Do we want a God who withholds information that puts us at risk? Would that God be good? ”
Unlike the drug companies, God never glosses over the consequences from the choices open to us, though we may not want to hear those either. We may feel God harsh or too restrictive in his warnings. We may judge his standards as unreasonable for the world we live in. We may prefer to focus on the side of God who loves and protects, and we hope grace will give us moral wiggle room. Some construct a version of God in their own image—one who blesses all sincere viewpoints and grades on a curve for good intentions. While tempting and all too human, these perspectives align more with wishful thinking than Bible-based truth. Do we want a God who withholds information that puts us at risk? Would that God be good?
Thankfully, God’s love surpasses allowing us to be satisfied with a placebo he knows will disappoint and fail. In fact, God’s warnings demonstrate a love that can fill us even more deeply than the promise of milk and honey. He extends love that always seeks our best welfare, even when we reject him.
The High Stakes of Obedience
The Bible book of Deuteronomy provides an example of love-generated warnings. As God’s chosen people begin to enter the bountiful land he promised them, they have a high calling to fulfill—to display their relationship with the one true God to all nations. To prepare them, God spends generations educating them about his holy character and the problem of sin that separates them from fellowship together. Divine laws teach them to live in loving connection with God and each other. God moves them ever forward toward restoring the intimate relationship he intended since the creation of humanity in the perfect Garden.
In preparation for inhabiting the land, God presents them with a covenant agreement. In simple language, if they obey God’s commandments, they will enjoy the blessings of flourishing and prosperity. If they do not, destructive curses will result.
"Now if you faithfully obey the LORD your God and are careful to follow all his commands I am giving you today, the LORD your God will put you far above all the nations of the earth. All these blessings will come and overtake you, because you obey the LORD your God: You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. Your offspring will be blessed, and your land's produce, and the offspring of your livestock, including the young of your herds and the newborn of your flocks. The LORD will establish you as his holy people, as he swore to you, if you obey the commands of the LORD your God and walk in his ways. Then all the peoples of the earth will see that you bear the LORD's name, and they will stand in awe of you.” (Deut. 28: 1-4; 9-10) (Emphasis added.)
The stakes of obedience are high, extending far beyond the Israelites. In vivid detail, God also specifies the severe consequences of violating their agreement:
"You will be driven mad by what you see. […] You will find no peace among those nations, and there will be no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and a despondent spirit. Your life will hang in doubt before you. You will be in dread night and day, never certain of survival.” (Deut. 28:24, 65-66)
Understanding the God Who Warns
As you read the entire chapter, God goes on and on with the most horrible descriptions. I won’t quote them here, but reading them I recoil and want to ask: Where is the God who loves and shepherds in green pastures? The God of these words terrifies me.
Following that thought, I recall the verse in Proverbs: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” (Prov. 1:7 NIV)
Part of maturity means the willingness to receive truth and let it give me wisdom to inform my decision-making. Will I look behind the curses of rebelling against God to discern the wisdom they impart and the love from which they spring?
“ We can freely choose to drink the poison that will rack us with pain and cause our death. But because of love, God will not let us make such a choice without full disclosure.”
Sometimes love gets lost in this story. The curses do not originate from anger or punishment. They deliver warnings as the first pangs of havoc that sin will wreak. We can freely choose to drink the poison that will rack us with pain and cause our death. But because of love, God will not let us make such a choice without full disclosure. Even more, the undiluted horrors he recites are a passionate plea to persuade us. Beware! This way leads to misery and death. You will lose everything of value to life and heart. Depart from me, and risk hell on earth and beyond. Not a popular thought or easy to hear, but the devastating reality when breaking with the Creator of goodness and life.
Free to Choose Love
Of course, not all suffering arises from our individual choices. But even then, God remains a vigilant and compassionate Shepherd as we follow him through the dark places and listen for his voice. Those experiences take place on sacred ground as even there, we choose him.
However, when we cut corners in our morality, we expose ourselves to the compounding effects of brokenness. When we compartmentalize God within boundaries of our choosing—bless me here, but don’t restrict me there—flourishing rests entirely in our own hands to accomplish. And when we shut God out to rule our lives as we please, we ignore the terrible danger of misusing creation.
With our God-given freedom, we can choose, but not blindly. God never stops loving, or pursuing, or telling us the truth. It costs him more than we can comprehend—rejection, pain, suffering, and death on a cross. But even that does not stop him. He takes the worst of all of it, for all of us. Will we heed the warnings and make the choice to live in the place of God’s blessing? Will we allow ourselves to be loved with that depth of passion?
Where in your life is God showing his love by revealing potential consequences?
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